Hello loyal readers. The staff behind this blog (Haggis, SilverWolfPet, and myself) have decided to take a break and put the blog on hiatus. There isn’t much Monkey Island news these days and while we tried to keep the blog alive with different reviews and articles reaching beyond Monkey Island we found out that that is not where our passion lies. We might resurrect this blog if a sequel to ‘Tales of Monkey Island‘ is announced or Ron Gilbert gets the opportunity to make his version of Monkey Island 3. Until then, we hope you enjoyed the blog and take care 🙂

If you play World of Warcraft (like Ron Gilbert and myself) then you are probably know many of the essential characters in the Warcraft lore. Maybe you even played some of the Warcraft RTS games. However, did you know that about 14 years ago Blizzard was working on an adventure game called Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans? By the sound of the title this could have been the first in a series of adventures set in the Warcraft world. The game was set to be released in 1997, but was delayed to late 1998 due to several development problems.

In May of 1998 the game was canceled because several sequenced of the game had to be be rewritten which would involve more ani9mation and more voice work. Bill Roper (producer) also felt the game looked dated when compared to Curse of Monkey Island which had been released the year before and the announcement 0f Grim Fandango sporting a 3D engine. These statements were mentioned again by Mike Morhaime (president and co-founder of Blizzard) during an interview at last week’s Blizzcon.

Read more about the canceled game on Wikipedia which also has some links to YouTube videos that have surfaced in the last couple of years.

Old Blind Pew (also known in-game as “old dog”) is an old, unwashed dog that Guybrush finds in the Blood Island cemetery. He really does seem to be blind since he wears smoked spectacles and has to sniff around to find treats; Guybrush says he’s “not very social.” He sleeps in a coffin doghouse and appears to be Mort the Gravedigger‘s pet.

In order to cure Griswold Goodsoup‘s hangover, Guybrush has to find “hair of the dog that bit ‘ya.” So he offers Old Blind Pew dog treats (in the regular version) or a half-eaten maggoty biscuit (in the Mega-Monkey challenge). Pew chomps down on it and, during the process, bites his arm. Guybrush is also able to easily get some of Old Blind Pew’s shedding dog hair.

You probably know the Lego video games, such as Lego: Pirates of the Caribbean. But before there were computer games, Lego already existed as little plastic bricks. It’s hard to imagine such a prehistory, but perhaps you yourself have played with them, and maybe you still do? Ah, the stories you can enact with the little yellow figures… someone has even recreated Mêlée Island with Lego bricks! How about you? Did you ever play with Lego? Maybe you made something Monkey Island related with Lego that you want to share? If so, do leave a comment, we’d love to hear your story!

Have you played any of the Monkey Island games that have been released on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3? And did you finish them? Good. But did you really finish them? Get all the achievements? You’re not sure? Well, then you need to head over to the Monkey Island wiki. There, you can find handy lists of all the Achievements on the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network Trophies. Have fun collecting them all!

The Tongue of the Manatee is an artifact that allows a person to communicate with manatees while underwater. It is in the shape of a large horn, and the user blows into the base to create the loud noise like a manatee’s voice. It comes with a standard set of phrases that a tourist might commonly use; it is up to the user to learn how to say more phrases.

In his quest for La Esponja Grande, Coronado De Cava knows that he will have to navigate the Manatee Mating Grounds, so he procures a Tongue of the Manatee to get past the giant female manatee who lives in the cave where La Esponja can be found. While he entrusts this task to his favourite crewman Santino, a deep-sea diver who learns the language of the manatees from the Marquis De Singe on Flotsam Island, he considers Santino too important to have such a menial task as holding the Tongue, which he gives instead to Moose. After the party is swallowed by a giant manatee and the crew goes down to its belly to party, Moose uses the Tongue as a funnel to drink copious amounts of ichor.

After Guybrush Threepwood has earned his way into the Democratically United Brotherhood of the Manatee Interior (founded by the four members of De Cava’s crew) and subsequently betrayed their trust, he learns from Noogie (or Bugeye or Moose, depending on which one Guybrush forces the information out of last) the true nature of Moose’s ichor-horn and returns to the Manatee’s belly to retrieve it. With it he is able to talk to the Manatee, but he cannot understand its responses until he finds a way back to Flotsam to get the Marquis’s book on the manatee language. With both these tools, Guybrush makes a deal with the male manatee, pretending to be him and wooing the female guarding La Esponja. He succeeds in drawing her out from her seclusion, and the two manatees are later seen swimming together and holding flippers.

No, I’m not talking about camping out in his yard or hiding all night in the bushes with a thermos filled with hot soup hoping to catch an elusive glimpse of Ron Gilbert only to find yourself disappointed after an uneventful 12 hours followed by a desperate rummage through his trash salvaging only half of a used q-tip and a discarded slice of pizza that hopefully hides some precious saliva but otherwise has lost all taste and is no longer the feast of flavors it once was.

No, I’m talking about following Ron Gilbert on various modern (and hip) social medias. That includes his Twitter account and his Google+ profile where he posts about things such as a Monkey Island themed Monopoly game, hi-res backgrounds of old LucasArts adventure games, his current projects, and stuff around the Internet he finds interesting.

Though the antique dealer believes that nobody knew where the ship sank or why, the book Great Shipwrecks of Our Century (which can be checked out from the Phatt City Library) has the location of the wreck. The figurehead, when Guybrush finally discovers it, turns out to be a giant brass monkey head.

If you’re one of the few people who have still not purchased Psychonauts, now’s a good time to right your wrongs. The Steam version of the game has received a bit of an overhaul, adding achievements and decreasing the difficulty of a particularly hard level (that I didn’t get to on my first playthrough, which reminds me I really need to play that game again). To be fair, the reason I didn’t finish it was because keyboard controls are just a bit too clunky for a platformer, so it’s nice that they also added support for an Xbox 360 controller in the update!